Since I regularly pay 3.00 for a loaf of earthgrain bread, I thought it might be amusing to compare prices to now. Of course in l947, I was making 26.00 a week in my first job as a telephone operator.

Bread....ten cents a loaf
Coffee...five cents a cup and free refills
Bologna...ten cents a pound
a huge watermelon...fifty cents
plate lunch...I usually had swiss steak....65cents
biscuts and gravy.....ten cents
A very extravagant suit.....40 dollars
cokes........5 cents
a1/4 lb candy bar....5 cents
and on and on.

My husband was an engineering student on the G.I. bill and I can't recall what he made but I think it was in the neighborhood of l00 dollars. Rent was fifty dollars a month and my grocery budget was l2.50 a month.

After graduation, Stuart started his first job at the princely sum of 200 dollars a month and we decided that I could stay home and have our first child. We also bought our first house on the G. I. bill. Little did we know that he would be called back into the service when the Korean War broke out. We rented our house,spent a year at Fort Belvoir where he taught O. C. S. classes, and had to use our savings to exist. We lived on the base and our rent was seventeen dollars a month. We had army issue furniture and mahogony pieces mingled with army cots.

That is when I fell in love with Virginia. I wanted to stay, he wanted to go. The Virgina State Employment Office
came out and offered jobs to the l6 or l7 engineers onthe base. He could also have recieved a direct commission.
Mama's boy wanted to come home. By the way, Linda was born in the Fort Belvoir hospital and her birth costs 7.50. That was the first rent in the fabric of our marriage but then that is another story.